The difference is that the stuff you buy “on the spot” is tested by locals in that environment. In my experience, I got my favourite rain gear from a local store in a place where it rains a lot, and the best mountain gear in a town that’s actually in the mountains. Online shopping, even with lots of research, can only take you so far.
Also, these things make great souvenirs. Every time I wear my merino wind buff, I think of that little Irish town on the Atlantic coast where I bought it, and how wet and windy it was.
A lot of apps are nagware, but I’ve never seen any as blatant and forceful as Duolingo.
They diligently A/B test their notifications, constantly looking for the variations that’ll show a higher click rate.
They’ll hit you with “[Your friend’s name] will hate you forever if you don’t do Duolingo right now!” if you start slipping.
I’ve dropped it after a year or so when I realized that I wasn’t really learning any Turkish, but I was caught in some sort of corporate-designed psychological trap.
Transferring patterns only really works when the language you’re learning is similar to ones you already know. I’m learning Chinese, and to my Western mind it feels like an alien language.
That’s exactly what the folks at Amazon thought when they came up with Alexa. Have you ever bought anything online by asking Alexa to do it? Have you ever seen anyone else do it?
What’s the value proposition here, exactly? You could replicate this functionality 1:1 by using a very simple spreadsheet with a couple charts - it wouldn’t take more than half an hour to make, you’d retain full control over your data and you wouldn’t have to pay $3/week for a product that can disappear at any time.
They’re definitely underrepresented in most contexts where you’d meet other coders - but make no mistake, half the business world runs on Java, and it’s still the main language taught in a lot of CS university programs.
? All opinions are biased by definition, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth listening to - especially when they’re well thought-out, well presented, and supported by data, which is the case here.
I do value self expression, that’s why I play multiple instruments, paint, draw, sculpt. I don’t really see how prompting a machine to make music for you is self expression, even if it’s to your exact specifications.
Very true, but there’s still a huge difference between acts of sabotage and missiles hitting cities. We might be at war, but so far it’s a comfortable one.
My laptop isn’t 7” wide because I do my work on it, and that work involves reading long text files and requires a keyboard big enough to comfortably type said long text files, not because “bigger screen = always better”. It’s all about the use case.
It’s important to separate graphics and UX here - I don’t mind if the soldiers and the aliens are blobs of pixels, or even just coloured squares, but the UI of the original UFO/XCOM games is pretty much incomprehensible to a modern player.
Regardless of disclaimer, I’m sure the food cooked on TV going to waste is not the norm - dozens of people are on set when filming any of these shows, and they’re all curious to try the dish.
Also players don’t know what they want. Good games aren’t just a result of a good idea that’s then implemented - they come from untold hours of iteration, tinkering, figuring out what’s fun, what isn’t, and why. That’s the hard part, and I have a hard time believing that hypothetical holodeck could ever do it.
There are large datasets of bird sounds (eBird, Cornell Labs, etc), but the descriptions are usually limited to the species, location, and something like “mating call” or “contact call”. Hugely useful for building models that can recognise birds by call (apps like that already exist, I recommend Merlin Bird ID), but definitely not enough for something approaching actual translation.
FWIW there’s no research to indicate that the sounds birds make are what we’d call language. They’re avid communicators, and some species are known to be highly intelligent, but of course it’s not like “caw” means “to fly” and “craah” is “forward”.
My guess is it’s because CSS is so dependent on context. Especially layout styles only make sense for a specific structure of HTML elements, which might be stored in an entirely different file and directory.
In my experience LLMs are surprisingly bad at CSS beyond a very basic level. They work fine if you need to change the color of a button, but when it comes to actual styling work, even intermediate stuff like position:absolute or CSS grid, Copilot or even CC default to outputting correct-looking gibberish really quickly.
“Somewhere in the mix”? Sure. I’ve seen TTRPG folks experimenting with LLMs for about as long as LLMs have been around. A couple years later it still can’t really run a session, but you might find it useful for generating some details of an adventure.
The big issue really is making its output interesting. As usual, an LLM will default to the most generic outcomes and settings. For a TTRPG to be fun you usually want surprise, drama, creativity - it can’t do any of those.